Longarm and the Great Divide (3 page)

Longarm was feeling considerably better by the time the coach pulled into Lusk for a quick change of horses. The sun was slanting low and the wind was picking up. The passengers in the coach were in for a long, cold night.

“I'll be leaving you here,” Longarm told the driver. “Any suggestions about where a man could find a decent room?” The prospects did not look great, not from looking around the town.

The driver pointed to a building in the next block. “You'll want to stay at the Drover's Rest there.”

“It's good?” Longarm asked.

The driver grinned and said, “It's the only.”

Longarm laughed. “In that case . . .” He picked up his bag and began hiking up the street toward the Drover's Rest.

 * * * 

After a sound sleep—disturbed not more than a dozen times by the hatmaker's supplies salesman he was required to share the bed with—Longarm had a hot breakfast and a cigar and pronounced himself fit for the day.

“I need t' hire a horse,” he told the gent at the café. “Where might I find one?”

“Only place in town that rents stock would be the livery,” the café owner said. “You can find it behind the stage stop yonder.” The man pointed, then used that finger to scratch his balls. Longarm was pleased that he had finished his meal
before
seeing that.

Longarm grabbed his bag and headed back toward the stagecoach station where his bedmate from the previous night was engaged in buying a ticket for points south.

Just as claimed, there was a tall, solidly built barn behind the stage depot. The place looked to be more soundly built and considerably quieter than the Drover's Rest had been, but it was a little too late to discover that now, otherwise he might have elected to curl up in a pile of hay rather than share bed time with a stranger. Particularly with a stranger who seemed to possess a bladder the size of a peanut.

The livery's corral held a collection of heavy-bodied cobs, likely the property of the stagecoach line and kept in rotation for pulling the coach. Several of those were handsome animals, but none of them was of interest to Longarm.

“I'm needing a good saddle horse,” Longarm told the hostler when the man showed up, an empty feed bucket in one hand and a curry comb in the other.

“Rent or buy?” the skinny old man asked.

“Rent,” Longarm said.

“I got one I could let out. For a price, of course. Up to you if you think he's ‘good.' I don't make no claims about that.”

“Drag him out here then,” Longarm said. “I'll take him.”

“You ain't seen him yet.”

“Doesn't matter. I got t' have a saddle horse for a few days so I'll take him regardless.”

The hostler turned his head and spat. “Wait here, mister. I'll be right back with your horse.”

“Saddle, too, o' course,” Longarm said.

“I got two. They're yonder,” the hostler said, pointing. “Take your pick.”

While the liveryman was out in the corrals fetching in the saddle horse, Longarm looked over the saddles. And concluded that if the horse was as bad as the worn-out saddles, he was in for a long day.

The horse, as it turned out, was not nearly as good as the saddles.

It was going to be a long day.

The day got longer and even less pleasant as he was approaching the wide spot where he assumed the stagecoaches pulled aside to meet the Thursday wagon from Valmere.

There were already two men there, saddles loosed, giving their horses a break while both man and animal had a drink, the horses drinking water from Hat Creek and the men quenching their thirst from a whiskey shared bottle.

“Howdy.” Longarm nodded and dismounted, glad to get off both the miserable saddle and the even worse horse. He led the stupid son of a bitch of a gelding to the thread of cool water and let the horse have its head so it could drink if it wanted to. Not that that was likely; the horse had not wanted to do much of anything Longarm suggested so far, so why should it start now?

He stretched, arching his back, then removed his coat and tied it on top of his carpetbag strapped behind the cantle of the livery saddle.

The two men got up from where they had been lounging on a patch of tall grass. There was something about the way they were looking at him . . .

“Well, shit,” Longarm mumbled as he slipped beneath the rented horse's neck so the animal was between him and the travelers.

“Mister,” the taller of the two called as they came near.

That one wore a derby hat and a sack coat. He had about a week's growth of dark beard and had run-down boots.

His companion was very slightly shorter and very slightly the better dressed of the two, wearing a tailored coat, bright bandanna, and wide-brimmed boss-of-the-plains hat crimped in a Montana peak.

Both men wore pistols hanging at their bellies.

Longarm peered at them over the back of his seal brown horse. “Ayuh?”

“We was wondering if you could help us out,” the shorter one said.

“Prob'ly not,” Longarm told them. “I don't know this country worth a damn. Just trying t' get to a place called Valmer or maybe it's Valmere. Anyway, I need t' get there, but I ain't from around here and wouldn't know enough t' give directions.”

“No, it ain't directions we're looking for.” The tall one glanced at the short one and both of them grinned a little.

The short one looked at Longarm and said, “What we had in mind was for you to help us with whatever money you got on you.”

“
All
of whatever money you got,” the tall one said.

Longarm sighed. “I don't think so.”

“Mind now, we did ask polite,” the short one said.

Both of them reached to take out their pistols.

“You're making a mistake,” Longarm told them. “A pretty bad mistake, so give this up before you get hurt.”

“Mister, let me remind you, we are two guns to your one, so you give it up before we hurt you.”

“Mister, may I inform you that your guns are in your leather while my .45 is right here in my hand.”

“Mister, I think you're lying.”

Longarm rested his left arm on his saddle while he leaned against the horse as it drank, head down, ears flapping back and forth while it swallowed.

He waited, hoping the two would give up their bad idea to rob a passing stranger and go back to their whiskey bottle. Hoping, but not really expecting.

He was right not to hope for a peaceful resolution to this little problem. The two idiots dragged iron.

Longarm gave the men time to reconsider while they took aim at his head, which was all that was exposed over the back of the brown horse.

Then the shooting started, and the two gents had run out of time.

Longarm dropped behind the brown horse, ducked low, and reemerged beneath the animal's neck.

His .45 bellowed, and the brown's head came up as the horse reared onto its hind legs.

Longarm fired again, taking the man on the right first, the smaller of the two. The son of a bitch would not go down so Longarm shot him a third time. He was positive his bullets flew true, but the little man simply refused to drop.

There was no time to fool with him any further for the taller one was shooting now. Longarm could hear the bumblebee drone of the slugs passing close by his head. He threw a hasty shot at the taller one and shot the short man a fourth time, that slug finally dropping him.

Longarm stood up, took careful aim and squeezed off a sixth . . . nothing.

His hammer fell on an empty chamber. In the heat of the moment he had forgotten that he was carrying only five cartridges in his Colt, this in case the livery horse gave him grief and made his .45 fall out of the leather.

Men have been known to shoot themselves—sometimes fatally—in just that manner, a revolver hammer striking the ground and in turn hitting the cartridge primer. That can be funny when the accidental shot hits no one; it can be tragic when the errant bullet strikes flesh.

Now Longarm had an empty gun and a pissed-off opponent not twenty feet away.

The man in the derby hat and black sack coat blasted nervously in Longarm's general direction, his bullets flying high until his gun, too, was empty.

Derby looked at Longarm, saw the lawman was out of ammunition, and reached for a knife.

Longarm also hauled a knife out, his a folding lockblade that he kept sharp enough for the occasional shave. He snapped it open and stepped around behind the brown horse.

“You killed my partner, you son of a bitch,” Derby snapped, his face contorting like he was close to breaking out in tears.

Longarm stood his ground, waiting to see if Derby was any better with a knife than with a gun.

Unfortunately he was. He dropped into a crouch and crept crabwise toward Longarm, staying low with his knife hand extended and a wide grin splitting his face.

It would have been a fine time to have a cartridge or three remaining in the Colt but what he had was a folding pocketknife and a determination that this grinning piece of shit was not going to gut him and leave his body beside a shallow creek in eastern Wyoming Territory.

Beside Longarm the brown horse coughed and went down to its knees. He would have gone to it to see if there was any way he could give it ease, but his attention was—and had to be—fixed on Derby. And on the man's wicked knife blade.

Derby came in closer, still grinning, still crouched low, still with blood in his eye.

Longarm waited. Weighed the familiar heft of his knife. Knew it came up short against the belt knife Derby wielded.

The thing about a knife fight is that they are sudden things, over almost as quickly as they begin. Longarm expected this one to be no different. He would pit his speed and determination against that of Derby.

And one of them would die.

Derby shuffled closer. Closer still.

The man's knife hand lashed out toward Longarm's belly.

And in less than a second the fight was over.

“You black-hearted, cocksucking bastard,” Derby groaned. “You've killed me, haven't you.”

Longarm hunkered down beside the man. He took out a cheroot and lighted it, remembering to offer it first to the man on the ground. Finally he nodded. “Ayuh, reckon I have.”

The haft of Longarm's knife protruded just beneath Derby's breastplate. The blade extended up under the ribs and probably pierced the lower end of the man's heart.

Longarm had suffered a razor-thin cut on the inside of his left bicep. If he had been wearing his coat, he thought, he would have escaped injury completely.

“How . . . how long?” Derby asked.

“Not long,” Longarm said. “Couple minutes maybe. Are you wanted for anything?”

“No, this . . . this was our first stickup.”

“You should've stuck to herding cows.”

“Will you have us buried proper?” Derby asked.

“I'm on official business, but I'll leave word. D'you have paper an' pencil?”

“I do. In my right-hand saddlebag. Will you see that we have markers, me and my pard?”

“That I will. It's why I asked for paper an' pencil.”

“My name is Chester Thomas Teegarten. My partner there is Wil Canby. That's Wilford.”

Teegarten was growing pale as the blood leaked from him, and his voice was weak. The man was still in his right mind, but he only had moments left, Longarm thought.

Longarm stayed beside him, smoking his cheroot, until Teegarten drew his last breath.

Then Longarm stood and went to the horses Teegarten and Canby had ridden to this spot. He rummaged through their saddlebags until he found the promised paper and pencil and wrote out a note saying he had killed them in the line of duty and they should be buried at government expense. He gave their names and a brief description so each body could be properly identified—not that he supposed it really made much of a difference now which marker went over which grave—and tucked the note into Teegarten's pocket.

He took a few more moments to drag the bodies to the side of the road where the next coach through would see them.

There was nothing he could do for the hired brown horse. The next time he was through Lusk he would give the livery man a voucher to pay for the miserable beast. Then he unsaddled and turned loose the poorer of the horses Teegarten and Canby had been riding. He tightened the cinch on the better of the two, a likely looking gray with good butt and wide stance in front, and transferred his gear to that horse.

He stepped onto the gray and touched it with his heels, guiding the animal onto the thin track left by the wagon that came once a week to collect the mail pouch for Valmere, Wyoming Territory. The horse splashed across the shallow stream that might—or might not—have been Hat Creek and headed east at a comfortable lope.

“What the fuck?” Longarm blurted aloud when he saw the signs that flanked the road.

A hundred yards or so back the track had taken a sharp turn to the north. Now he was confronted by this pair of signs. The one on the left read
VALMERE, WYO. TERR.
and the sign on the right read
STONECIPHER, NEBRASKA
.

The town that lay beyond them was equally split, left and right. One general mercantile on the left and another, almost-identical store facing it across the wide road. The false front of a saloon was on the left and another, almost-identical saloon facing it across the road on the right side.

Beyond the stores were equally similar smithies, each with a public corral attached. Aside from those there were a scant few houses on either side of the road.

The road itself widened here so there was room for normal traffic to pass on either side of a line of stakes that were driven down the middle of the roadway.

“What the fuck?” Longarm repeated to himself as he entered . . . he was not entirely sure if he was riding into Valmere, Wyoming Territory . . . or Stonecipher, Nebraska. Or both.

Valstone, the message back in Billy Vail's office said it was from. Valstone. Valmere plus Stonecipher apparently equaled Valstone.

Longarm rode into town—or the towns, plural—on the Wyoming side of the markers, past the storefronts to the blacksmith's shop. He reined to a halt and dismounted there.

The smithy, a smallish, wiry man with dark hair and powerful arms, stepped out to make a very obvious inspection of the gray horse. After a moment he said, “You ride a Cutrell horse but you don't dress like no Cutrell man. Who are you and what are you doing on this side of the divide?”

“Pardon me?”

“I said . . .”

“Oh, I heard you, mister, but I don't understand what you're sayin',” Longarm explained. “First off, I don't know anybody named Cutrell. The horse is one I was left with after the fella that had been on it killed my animal. An' who I ride for is the U.S. government. I'm the deputy marshal someone here sent for.”

The blacksmith broke into a broad smile. He snapped his fingers and did a little jig. “Hot damn. We're finally going to settle this thing. We'll finally get rid of those sons o' bitches.”

“Uh, exactly what sons o' bitches would you be talkin' about?” Longarm asked.

“Why, them sons o' bitches across the way, of course.” The blacksmith waved in the general direction of Nebraska.

“The sons . . .”

“Bastards stole our town. Stole the location, anyhow. As you can plainly see for your own self.” Again the smith waved across the broad street toward Nebraska. “This here is a Wyoming town. We want you to make those Cutrell and Sagamore and Gleason bastards take their town someplace else.”

“Look, this is all kinda confusing,” Longarm said. “How's about I unsaddle this Cutrell horse . . . whatever that's s'posed to mean . . . an' find a place for both him an' me to stay for a spell. Can you board this horse for me, mister? Even if it is a Cutrell horse?”

“Oh, sure, I can do that. He can stand in my corral along with the others.” The smith grunted. “I expect the horses won't know the difference when I put him in among them.”

Longarm unstrapped his carpetbag from behind the cantle of what had been Chester Teegarten's saddle and loosened the cinch of the gray. He draped the saddle over a rail of the corral fence and led the gray inside to get at the hay and water available there.

“Any idea where I might put up?” he asked the smith.

The man seemed to find the question amusing but after a moment he said, “Generally the fellas who show up here want mostly two things. And sleep ain't either one of them. But maybe you could have a bed in Stella's whorehouse yonder. It's the biggest house this side of the street.” He pointed and grinned. “God knows they got beds there but I doubt there's ever been anybody using one of them just to sleep in.”

“There's noplace else?” Longarm asked.

“Not that I can think of,” the blacksmith said. “They're nice folks at Stella's, though. Give them a try. Then get about the business of kicking out those sons o' bitches across the street.”

Longarm picked up his bag and headed off in the direction the smith had indicated, still not sure just what the hell he was doing here.